Title
Representing Network Trust and Using It to Improve Anonymous Communication.
Abstract
Motivated by the effectiveness of correlation attacks against Tor, the censorship arms race, and observations of malicious relays in Tor, we propose that Tor users capture their trust in network elements using probability distributions over the sets of elements observed by network adversaries. We present a modular system that allows users to efficiently and conveniently create such distributions and use them to improve their security. The major components of this system are (i) an ontology of network-element types that represents the main threats to and vulnerabilities of anonymous communication over Tor, (ii) a formal language that allows users to naturally express trust beliefs about network elements, and (iii) a conversion procedure that takes the ontology, public information about the network, and user beliefs written in the trust language and produce a Bayesian Belief Network that represents the probability distribution in a way that is concise and easily sampleable. We also present preliminary experimental results that show the distribution produced by our system can improve security when employed by users; further improvement is seen when the system is employed by both users and services.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2014
CoRR
computer network security,uncertainty,routing,systems engineering,internet,semantics,natural language,bandwidth,risk analysis,ontology,bayes theorem,packet switching,network architecture,experimental design,algorithms
Field
DocType
Volume
Express trust,Ontology,Computer science,Computer security,Network security,Network architecture,Theoretical computer science,Bayesian network,Natural language,Network element,The Internet
Journal
abs/1406.3583
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
7
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Aaron D. Jaggard110.36
Aaron Johnson238020.14
Paul Syverson34713457.55
Joan Feigenbaum44714711.33